


Twelve Point Turn

by DammitToby



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Section 31, Winter Soldier AU, Winter Soldier!Bones
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 08:50:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4998436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DammitToby/pseuds/DammitToby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Note: This is a hybrid universe, beginning after the events of STID and containing no Marvel characters. Though the moniker Agent 13 is used, it is a representation of Marvel influence rather than a pure adaptation of the Marvel character of the same name.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Twelve Point Turn

1.

His last memory as a free man: the Transporter room is dark enough to raise the hairs on the back of his neck. He meets blue eyes through threads of gold light.

"We'll fix this, Bones."

Gold threads knot together, cutting off all vision, the hum of excited energy drowning out all else (electrical short sparks? debris falling?). Before the world falls away, he feels his resolve settle. They'll fix this. It's certain. What else is there left to lose?

2.

His left arm is the only part of his body that remains whole, and that’s why he tattoos the formulas there. Agent 13 told him that was a bad idea, if Section 31 got ahold of him they wouldn’t necessarily need him alive in order recreate the serum if he left them the instructions on his skin. He told her that was the plan. Besides, he was leaving out the modifications he made so it worked, so if Section 31 tried to use the serum, they’d end up with bodies like Leonard’s. Even if they had the prototype serum, they didn’t have Agent 13’s biomechanics team.

She allows it, mostly because they both know if he really put his mind to it, she’d never be able to stop him. Not anymore, not after what they made him.

His left hand contains almost all his original nerves and bones, it’s the closest he has to his past humanity, and as such, after every mission he uses his left hand to touch the cryotube in his quarters, his fingers brushing the bottom of the seam of glass and metal, where you can just barely see a head of brown curls peak out.

The timer reads that it’s been 78 years since the freeze started.

3.

They bring him out of cryo conscious, and the world burns and doesn’t come into focus. He can’t hear. He can’t smell. His mouth feels like its been coated in a film of rotten slime.

His entire body won’t respond to his commands. The light in his eyes is blinding, shadows flit across his vision, every now and then overlapping to form a vague, person-like shape.

Voices, maybe, mechanical whirs (was that a bone saw he heard?).

Someone pricks him, and the world dissolves into bloody static.

4.

He wakes up. He isn’t sure if he’s in pain. His mouth is crusty, he thinks he tastes blood.

“You’re awake.” He can’t move to look at the voice, but luckily she moves. Suddenly the world orients itself, and he knows he’s lying on a low bed, and she is standing above him. Her hair is the color of autumn sun on dead leaves. “I’m going to restore your ability to move.”

The first thing he realizes is that her voice sounds like it’s swimming in thick soup, which might have something to do with the way his head feels like pent up pressure. The second thing he realizes is that the walls of the room around him resemble a mechanics shop more than a hospital. The third and final thing he realizes is that he is now very sure that he’s in pain.

He blacks out.

5.

He’s been awake for a week now, and he still feels foreign in his own body. Well, what’s left of it. He’s sitting in his cot, it’s been a long day of physical therapy but he’s not tired. He doesn’t seem to get tired any more.

He flexes his right hand, marveling at how the metal just under his skin doesn’t actually break through. It’d a semi-internal skeleton, based on the prototype exoskeletons that were Agent 13’s life’s work, except his is better, on the cutting edge, and is fused to the weakened bone tissue to reinforce the changes made when they gave him the serum.

He should be angry. He has vague flashes of what he thinks are memories, of his own screams, and of feeling bone break in his grip.

6.

His first mission was a rescue mission, only he didn’t know it until after he drove the stolen freighter into their blacked-out hijacked star base. He’s on edge, he’s been awake for a month and he can feel whatever they use to keep him cold wearing off. His own screams echo in his head, and they seem to be getting louder. While the mission itself completes without a hitch, on his way back to storage, Agent 13 intercepts him.

“You’ll want to see this.”

The cargo door opens with a crunch. Frost crawls over the walls and ceilings of the inner hull, and he whistles.

“Human popcicles.” He says. It’s the first time he’s spoken in years.

“414 of them.” She says. “Your crew.”

He gives her a sharp look, but she’s stepped forward into the room.

“When we intercepted you, we were actually intercepting an interception. Section 31 had plans for your crew.”

Memories flood back, he and Jim running down a hall, the red warning lights bathing the white of the walls. They were evacuating. They were the last on board. Scotty met them at the door, they had to hurry they had to hurry before the transporter timer hit zero.

He understood.

“You were trying to intercept Jim.”

She looks back. Her hair is still autumn sunlight, but his enhanced eyes could tell brown roots were starting to grow in. Her hair was an illusion, a subtle manipulation to try to earn his complicit obedience. Her eyes are the wrong color. They’re brown.

“We were lucky to get you.” She turns back. “And so were they. I don’t know what Section 31 would have done if they got the full set.”

She trusts him at her back. “413.”

“414.”

He frowns. “You intercepted me, that leaves 413.”

“It would have, but we got a bonus.” She leads him to cryotank that at first he thinks is empty. Then he sees the top of a curly brown head.

“Joanna. Why-?” He could reach out now. She must know that, and with what he knows, what's been written into his memory and body, she wouldn't last a minute.

“Why do you think? We intercepted you.”

She must know. “Blackmail.”

“It worked once.” She does. She turns to catch his eyes. Hers may not be the same electric blue, but they burn just a fiercely. “The world has gone to hell, Leonard, we need you to help us set it right. This wouldn’t be the first time you played God.”

She wasn’t wrong.

7.

For his second mission, he wakes up en-route to a star base not marked on any stellar map. They give him a cell number. They tell him not to be seen, or he’ll have to kill before they kill him. He accepts those terms. The screams in his head are quiet.

“You were a doctor. You know how to kill quietly.”

He nods.

He steps in a radio silent single man pod. It only has two trips in it, one to the base and one back. He makes it just outside a docking door, wedged at the very edge of a daily deliver drone.

As he moves through the base, he passes labs. Sterile labs, with a single table in the middle of a room, perfectly placed in the center of a large view screen. It reminds him of an operating theater, though the tools are outdated. No one uses metal scalpels in a real operating theater anymore.

The cells are below that. He avoids the lift, instead taking a service shaft. Cell 376 is a large cell. Bare. Containing one figure curled in on themself in the corner. He’s old. He has strangely pointed ears. It looks as though he had been trying to sit cross-legged, and his strength had given out so he slumped against the wall.

The cell door opens without protest when he enters in stolen codes. He slowly approaches the figure. The figure stares ahead, eyes glazed over. But when Leonard reaches down and touches him, the man groans. Leonard freezes, cursing at himself when he realizes he touched the man with his bare left hand.

Brown eyes look up at him, shiny with pain. “Leonard, what have they done to you?”

He kills the Vulcan before he can speak again and give away Leonard’s position.

Agent 13 waits on the Bridge when he returns. “You had to kill him, Leonard,” she says, though he doesn’t know why she’s explaining to him. Then again, he doesn’t know why his eyes are wet, or why he’s clenching his fists. “Section 31 can’t be allowed to recreate Red Matter. The results would be devastating. You had to do it.”

He hears the screaming again. They put him back in cryo.

8.

He can hear the screaming. Can no one else? his body is being used, but he can't tell for what purpose. A barrier breaks, something shatters, something screams, he moves forward down the halls. Does he meet anyone? Probably, but their screams are never loud enough. His own thoughts are barely loud enough. His vision overlaps until he sees a tall rectangle, decorated at the edges with strange white lace, cut through at chest level with a steel band that has lettering on it. What does it mean? Was the screaming in his head always punctuated with flashing red lights?

No. Clarity seeps in gradually, like a man waking from drunken stupor. That was the alarm, no doubt meant for him. Just as the sound of men's pounding footfalls were also probably meant for him. He reads the steel band as quickly as he can. 414.

Joanna.

He's surrounded. Men are yelling at him. He punched a man with his right hand. He heard his neck snap.

He hadn’t meant to.

They put him cryo, leading him through the base with a platoon of heavily armed men. The men weren’t necessary, he’s still staring at his right hand in disbelief, at the gleaming metal under his skin that reinforce his knuckles, when the ice blanks out everything.

9.

“We can revive them.”

He’s been awake for four hours, but this time is different. This time he woke up with the screaming, and he understands. He remembers. His name is Leonard Horatio McCoy. He had been a doctor once.

Agent 13 sits across from him on the right side of desk. Her hair is still the color of the autumn sun, freshly dyed no doubt. Between them is a PADD with a fullscreen view into the cryo storage unit. The crew of the Enterprise. Joanna.

“What’s the catch?” His voice is hoarse to his own ears, like he hasn’t used it in a long time. The timers under the units read 75 years. “Why now?”

“We’re fighting a war, Leonard. Section 31 controls what’s left of the Federation, but they’re crumbling under Klingon pressure and the internal rot of the Orion Trade they’ve established. To make this right, to undo all the damage and restore the Federation back to it’s ideals, we’ll have to use our last resort.”

“You want super soldiers. You want to turn them into me.”

“No. Not you. You were a fluke. But you can fix the formula.”

He laughs, bitter. “You don’t know that.”

“I do. You already have, with him.” She points to the cryotank containing James T. Kirk. His eyes flash.

“So that’s why you wanted him.”

“If you can fix the formula, we can wake them up.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They can’t consent in this stage. Wake them up, and then we’ll talk. Let them chose before you make them your mindless slaves.”

Her lips purse. “We can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?”

“Without the serum, taking them out of cryosleep won’t wake them up. It’ll kill them.”

10.

They put him in cryo before he can kill her. When he wakes up again, she’s there, her arm still mending but she seems to have forgiven him. Her guards watch him with enough venom to tell him they have not.

She hands him a PADD with all the formula data.

“Wake them up.”

11.

Jim comes to slowly. It’s not how he woke up, he made sure of that. They’re in a recovery room. He watches as Jim’s eyes twitch and crack.

Jim tries to talk, but it comes out lumped into a brittle groan. He swallows, then tries again. “-ones?”

“I wish, kid, but not anymore.”

12.

There's no golden light here in the wreckage. Just bare metal walls scuffed with age, new weaponry mixed with old, and a team (significantly smaller than before) lumbering about, trying their best to look dead-eyed and not nostalgic or homesick. Leonard wanders over to a particular figure (familiar despite his darkened gold hair grown out, or the stubble that told all he could care less about decorum in these circumstances).

"Jim."

"James." The correction is sharp. Unrecognizably harsh.

"We'll fix this." It's an offer.

Blue eyes stare at him, molten ice. Then Jim shifts, the light catching the metal of Jim's new skull, his death's head grin (perhaps that is what the beard is meant to cover). "Yeah, Bones. We will. What else is there left to do?"

As he says it, Leonard can't help but hear the underlying statement, bitter and fresh. "There's nothing left to lose." He doesn't answer, having never known the answers as well as he knew promises. They will fix this.

They have to. 


End file.
